Ever wonder what cognitive science really is useful for?
How about the application software that you are using right now? Do you think the designers and programmers come up with these just to confuse you? (well, sometimes that may be true.)

Cognitive science, or at least the cognitive psychology (or CP) part of it aids in development of user interfaces and the human-computer interactivity or HCI. CP is used to expose all the obviousness behind human thinking. It helps predict the actions that are required to perform certain tasks, especially when it pertains to the computer. Since the computer has limited resources for behaviour (unlike the human), algorithms must be in place to anticipate human behaviour. This is where the cognitive sciences can flourish...not just in psychiatric wards or the psychiatrist's office. Actual use of such information can be limitless.

Cognitive Science is the endeavour to model thought processes and cognitive representations (and the subsequent intelligent behaviour that arise from them) in purely scientific terms. Currently, the main focus of Cog. Sci. is to resolve the behavioural and cognitive levels of mental activity - the biological aspect is not given as much attention, because we currently lack the tools to investigate it thoroughly. Cog. Sci. has very strong links with Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence (Chomsky has a lot to say about the subject). It's currently quite a young discipline, with the potential to branch off in several directions and to alter its objectives and stance on several key issues as advances in its related fields filter through.

If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.

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